Turkey, Reaping What It Sows....
"[Turkey is not 'at war' with its Kurds or the PKK] You can not say if al-Qaeda attacks Britain it is a war between Britain and al-Qaeda. This is a terrorist attack."Where there's smoke, there's fire, and there is what is considered to be more than ample circumstantial evidence that the government of Turkey at the very least turned a blind eye to the presence of Islamic State fighters within Turkey, and Turkey's helpfulness in allowing foreign jihadis through its borders to join ISIL. Let alone the blackmarket whitewashing of Islamic State's oil products to benefit its ongoing caliphate advance.
"No government, neither European or American democratic government can tolerate a group which is calling people for rebellion against the legitimate government."
"[As for Turkey supporting ISIL] No. Never. Never. Never. We supported only those who escaped from Assad's atrocities - chemical weapons, barrel bombs."
"This [support of Islamic State] is an unfair assessment and accusation against Turkey [for] which there is no ground at all. If there is anybody who has a proof for this, they should put this on the table."
Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu
Turkey's usefulness to the U.S.-led airstrike alliance against Islamic State is turning out to be a predictable liability rather than an assumed asset. The lethal attraction of the Kurds to the Turkish authorities has led Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to throw the truce agreement with the PKK into the trash bin of historical misdemeanors.
Under the guise of finally deciding to throw in their lot with those allied with the U.S.-led airstrike coalition, dedicating their attention to countering the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant's surging victories with defeats, Ankara has identified the PKK as the greater of the problems facing Turkey. Dedicating the bulk of its attention to the threat it perceives from within, rather than that raging outside its borders.
A convoy of peshmerga vehicles is escorted by Turkish Kurds on their way to the Turkish-Syrian border in Kiziltepe Photo: ReutersKurdish separation is to the Government of Turkey what a red cape is to a raging bull. At 20 percent of the population, the restive Kurdish Turks yearn for a homeland of their own, one promised them by the British-French colonialists of the Middle East, but reneged upon, leaving the Kurds vulnerable to a state of perpetual oppression by Turkey in particular, along with Iran, Syria and Iraq with their smaller but militarily adept Kurdish populations.
The Kurds are nothing like their Muslim oppressors, practising an egalitarian statehood, and amenable to the presence of ethnic and religious minorities. By choosing to bomb the PKK camps in Iraq, Turkey has delivered the message that all hopes for conciliatory getting-along is illusory. It's more than likely that the die was cast when the June general election delivered a larger number of parliamentary seats to the elected Kurdish representatives than anticipated, leading to a diminished Justice and Development majority and with it power, for Erdogan's party.
Turkey has complicated an already-complex war situation in the Middle East, where a two-pronged war was taking place; one against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the other against the Islamic State caliphate. It has expanded its bombing of PKK targets in Iraq, to those existing in Syria, compounding the situation of explosive conflict with its own agenda to wipe out Kurdish opposition to Turkey's discriminatory power over the 18 million Turkish Kurds.
Turkey's vendetta against the Kurds is a distraction unneeded by the coalition battling ISIL. While Turkey turns its attention to destroying Kurdish militias, the Islamic State jihadists are growing in strength, tenacity and boldness. The Nusra Islamist militias whose own conflict with the Islamic State militias had been a plus to the present is now removed, leaving ISIL with one less competitor and with its absence, the withdrawal dictated by Nusra's unwillingness to be seen battling the same war as the U.S.-led coalition, no need to be concerned with defending its border against Nusra fighters.
Turkey needn't be surprised that it has opened a hornet's nest of response from the PKK. On Monday, nine people, including five police officers, were killed in separate attacks in Istanbul. That attack and another in southeastern Sirnak province was blamed on the PKK. Which claimed responsibility for bombing a police station along with an attack on police officers inspecting the scene, according to the pro-Kurdish Firat news agency which claimed the attack was planned to honor a PKK fighter killed in a Turkish airstrike in northern Iraq
Labels: Conflict, Islamic State, Kurds, Syria, Turkey
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, August 12, 2015
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